Feeling Nostalgic? Run WinAmp in a Web Browser & Play MP3s!

Do you remember WinAmp, the old funky ’90s music player for Windows and Mac? If you were a computer user in the late 1990s during the dot com boom, you probably used WinAmp to play your MP3 library, maybe even running it alongside Napster. At that time the quirky media player felt very modern and cutting edge, and was so ubiquitous that it was kind of like the iTunes of the era. If you had a computer and an mp3 collection, you probably used WinAmp.

Well if you’re feeling some computing nostalgia for WinAmp, you’re in luck because an enterprising developer has recreated a fully functional WinAmp2 clone entirely in Javascript, and that means you can run good old WinAmp today in your web browser on a Mac, Windows PC, or even iOS device.

WinAmp JS plays music, has an adjustable equalizer, a music playlist, and of course it features the exact same quirky interface that defined the entire experience. Will this be practical for actually listening to music? Of course not. Is it a fun retro look at the past of media players that may stir up some memories of 20 years ago? You betcha!

All you need is a modern web browser on a Mac, Windows PC, Linux, Android, or iOS device, and you’re ready to play around with WinAmp.

You can even add your own music by importing it into the WinAmp web client. Just open the files through WinAmp, or you can drag and drop your own mp3’s into the WinAmp web browser window to play them (remember it’s easy to search your Mac for specific file types like mp3 with the ‘kind:mp3’ Spotlight search parameter). Adjust the EQ, create a playlist of your favorite 90s mp3s, and you can pretend like it’s 1998 all over again.

WinAmp JS is also open source, so if you feel like digging around in the source code on GitHub or spinning it off into some other curious project, then you’ve got a springboard to do so.

Is this the most useful thing you’ll ever find? Maybe it is! OK, probably not, but it sure is fun!

6 Comments

If you like this, I suggest you give audacious a try; it’s a native media player that’s winamp skin compatible, and it functions extremely similarly; with a skin equipped, you probably couldn’t tell the difference. On OS X, I believe it’s available through homebrew, and if you happen to have Windows or Linux you can download prebuilt packages for them. Check it out! https://audacious-media-player.org/

Another way to have a WinAmp like , or for Mac user better yet , a SoundJam MP like music player ;p , is to install Audacious music player via MacPorts. It use the same skins as SoundJam and WinAmp, there are hundreds of it…

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